What went wrong? The president and his aides failed to keep his youth movement engaged. But part of the problem also is the inability of the millennial generation to remain attached to a cause. . . .

Even if Obama had worked harder to keep his youth army engaged, it’s not entirely clear that the effort would have succeeded. As a group, the generation’s attachment is fickle. . . .

The millennials are at least as passionate as earlier generations and more entrepreneurial, but they lack ties to institutions — unions, political parties, churches — because of their online existence. . . .

I have a simpler explanation: Obamacare dramatically raised insurance costs for young people, using them to subsidize older people buying insurance. Young people were already paying too high premiums as a result of state regulations, and Obama merely made that problem much worse. Why should the rate that people buy insurance go up when you are asking them to buy unfair insurance?

Young people have signed up at a significantly lower rate than the administration had hoped, raising fears among Affordable Care Act advocates.

The fewer young and healthy people sign up, the higher premiums are likely to rise for older people for whom insurance is more of a necessity. . . .

But even so, the need for young enrollees is acute, and it is forcing President Obama to try to reconnect with an important part of his base. He won 60 percent of the youth vote in 2012, but that support is not easily translating into enrollment. . . .

The reason why insurance premiums for older people will rise if not more young people sign up is simple: you won’t have enough young people to pay more than their costs to subsidize the older people.

The fear that I have is that once many of these institutions are enacted some of the structure of the private market will be destroyed and it will be costly to replace it. Despite Obama’s claim that everyone should fall in line now, it is nice to see that some states are delaying putting it in place. From Politico:

. . . Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, Bob McDonnell and Rick Perry all responded to the Supreme Court’s decision by saying they’ll keep fighting — even as the White House on Friday made clear its response: Fine, we’ll do it without you.
The Republican governors’ message was clear on a morning Republican National Committee conference call, when Jindal and McDonnell stressed their continued defiance of the Affordable Care Act and said they will resist implementing the state-based health insurance exchanges for which the law calls.
“Here in Louisiana, look, we refused to set up the exchange. We’re not going to start implementing Obamacare,” Jindal said. “We have not applied for the grants, we have not accepted many of these dollars, we are not implementing the exchanges, we don’t think it makes any sense to implement Obamacare in Louisiana.”
The response from GOP governors was similar elsewhere. . . .

Anybody who knows me knows how I feel about racial preferences. I used to blog for the American Civil Rights Institute, an organization created to eradicate the practice in government, and I’ve written about preferences a few times at Pajamas Media.

“Affirmative action” opponents have been waiting for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether to hear arguments in Fisher v. Texas, a case in which the plaintiffs allege the University of Texas rejected their applications because they’re white.

In 2003, the court ruled in Grutter v. Bollinger that schools may use race as a “plus” factor in admissions, while the same court ruled in companion case Gratz v. Bollinger that schools can’t use a points-for-race system. It is my fervent hope that the court strikes down all policies that factor race into admissions decisions at taxpayer-supported institutions. The practice is unfair, demeaning, and a double-edged sword.

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